Michael leaves town for his best friend’s bachelor party and I have to go to bed without him. Falling asleep when my body’s the only one under the covers isn’t the hard part. This part is luxury: taking up the entire mattress, unfurling my full wingspan across the uneven row of pillows, stretching my spine until it feels like the vertebrae that link my pelvis to my shoulders will pop. Michael usually stays up later than I do, coding for side projects or gaming with friends online, and the sounds of him clicking and clacking and laughing in the other room bring comfort. It’s not his body I want; it’s the assurance of his presence somewhere close by, even if I can’t feel him. Knowing he’s not here hollows our house into an echoing shell.
During the daytime, I play melancholy singer-songwriter music over the sound system. Acoustic guitar chords trail me from room to room. I’m about to step into the backyard when I’m stopped on the threshold by a voice I haven’t heard since high school. I know it without a second's hesitation—this is Jon Foreman, lead singer of Switchfoot. I was the kind of evangelical teen who listened almost exclusively to Christian music. And while Switchfoot refused to be pigeonholed as a Christian band—they branded themselves as a group of California surfers who happened to love Jesus—their music set the backbeat to my adolescence.
But the song playing on my speaker in my kitchen isn’t one Switchfoot put out when I was in high school. The lyrics startle me almost as much as my immediate recognition of his voice. This Jon Foreman is reckoning with the loss of belief, just like I am.
When Jon Foreman sings, “Welcome to the planet/ welcome to existence,” in the song “Dare You to Move,” first released in 2000, I am being born as a Christian girl. “Everybody's watching you now,” he sings, and I’m twelve years old, walking into the fellowship hall at church on a Friday night for youth group. My entire life will unfurl from this point forward: a life in which I will profess my faith in Christ no matter what. In daytime school assemblies my friends and I are learning about Rachel Joy Scott and Cassie Bernall, Christian girls valorized as martyrs after they were shot at Columbine, thirty miles to the south of us. Supposedly the gunmen asked Cassie if she was a Christian before they put a bullet in her head. I am lying awake at night in my handpainted blue-and-green loft bed, wondering if I have what it takes to stare down the barrel of a Glock and say yes to living and dying for Jesus.
The high-fuzz guitar triplet that opens “Meant to Live” transports me to eighth grade, mock-head-banging with the other girls at Winter Retreat. We’re cloaked in oversized t-shirts and bell-bottom jeans. We are laughing at ridiculous skits on stage and we are playing rambunctious games of Capture the Flag and we are pouring out our hearts during small group prayer sessions after the nightly talk. We are brainstorming how to convert our nonbelieving friends, because our lives will matter if we spread the word about Jesus. “We were meant to live for so much more,” Foreman howls into the microphone, “but we lost ourselves.” If we don’t cling to Christ with every fervent fiber of our beings, we’ll be lost. My evangelical adolescence is colored with a punishing dualism; I believe that we are always either growing into more or retreating into less, we are always living a little bit more or dying a little bit more. I will scream myself hoarse along with Foreman: “We want more than this world’s got to offer/ we want more than the sins of our fathers/ and everything inside/ screams for second life.”
“This is your life/ and today is all you got now,” Foreman sings over tinkly, looped guitar. Switchfoot’s sound is bright and upbeat, but it carries an implicit intensity: the pressure that pulses in every extremity of my evangelical experience. “This is your life/ are you who you wanna be?” My heartbeat syncs to the music and I am striving to be more, to be better, to be closer to God. Always striving.
The summer I turn seventeen, Switchfoot’s album, “Hello Hurricane,” provides the soundtrack for our drive from Colorado to Ohio for a Christian youth conference. I am buckling myself into the front bench seat of the ancient fifteen-passenger Ford van we used for every church trip, and my thighs are sweat-suctioning to the red vinyl upholstery. The endless cornfields of Nebraska are whipping past the van windows and I am singing along with Foreman: “I’m headed for the final precipice/ but you haven't lost me yet.”
Years have elapsed since I last listened to Switchfoot, or any of the music that existed alongside and reiterated my beliefs. At some point I didn’t know how to find myself in the songs anymore, so I stopped playing them. And yet here is Jon Foreman, served up unexpectedly by a Spotify algorithm, singing in my kitchen—and just like I am, he is questioning God.
“Jesus,” he sings, “feels like the world’s in pieces/
I’m sure you got your reasons/
but I have my doubts/
Jesus, I have my doubts”
My feet freeze on the threshold and keep me rooted until the chords fade. It’s not until the next song starts that I realize my cheeks are slick with tears. I brush them off with the back of my hand, turn off the music, and go outside.
I don’t replay the song during the day. The song’s effect is electric, and I don’t want to risk diluting its potency. I avoid going to bed for as long as I can, and when I finally slither under the sheets, hours after nightfall, the room feels cavernous around me. Its dimensions distort and expand, like a subterranean grotto that morphs into the inside of a monster’s mouth. I already lowered the blinds on the front window so the glow from the streetlamp outside won’t keep me awake, but the unpunctured darkness emphasizes my isolation and I can feel my body shrinking, as if I’m regarding myself from space; my existence is just a speck thrown against the limitless backdrop of the universe. Everything is darkness and I’m seized with the juvenile reflex to seek consolation. The impulse is strong enough to summon the VeggieTales jingle that served as my childhood nightmare deflector—“God is bigger than the boogieman/ he’s bigger than Godzilla or the monsters on tv.” The lyrics materialize on my tongue like several packets of Splenda, choking me with their sweetness, their artificiality. What if God isn’t bigger than the boogieman? Or rather, what if God isn’t any realer than the boogieman? Just another imaginary construct? What then?
When I was little and would wake up in the middle of the night, plagued by bad dreams, Dad would come sit on the edge of my bed, holding my monkey-bar-calloused hands in his, and he’d tell me to pray and ask God to take away the scary thoughts. But what if there’s no God to do so? What if there’s no barrier between me and inarticulate terror?
I reach over to my iPhone plugged in on the bedside table. Its screen illuminates immediately, responding to need. My thumbprint unlocks the home screen and I call up the music app, search Foreman’s name, hit play. The open, acoustic guitar chords, high reverb, and disembodied, inarticulate vocals, conjure such a familiar feeling that tears swell in my eyes before his first word: “Jesus…”
A lifetime of devotion, revisited and called into question. “When everything that’s right feels wrong/ when all of my belief feels gone,” he sings. Ever since my atheist husband and I moved back to Colorado, I’ve been sifting through the shards of my faith, pressing on them harder and harder to find out what they’re made of, and maybe in the process I’m grinding the glass down to dust. Belief doesn’t feel like something I can choose anymore; it feels like an entity that’s abandoned me without my consent. “Can you reach me here in the silence?’ Foreman begs. The dark room shimmers with emptiness in the wake of his question.
“Are you there?/ Can you hear me?” Foreman asks. The song’s melody stalls for a moment while Foreman adds to his litany of questions. With each line, his voice gets higher.
“Do you care?/
Are you near me?/
‘Cause I’m scared, and I’m weary/
Are you there?”
His interrogation balances on this note, the highest of the song, a musical and emotional breaking point. Foreman strings the questions together like he’s begging for intervention. But he completes the musical phrase without pause. Maybe it would be projection to say Foreman is alone with his despair. A wordless grief envelopes me and I feel like I am falling, falling, falling, and no safety net of assurance remains that can catch me. The insistent guitar strumming fades and the silence of my empty bedroom stretches wall to wall and the pillowcase is damp beneath my cheek. What if existence is just a howling bottomless void—no Jesus to hold it all together? No golden streets in which to dance and praise the source of all meaning?
For most of my life, I deeply, sincerely believed every iota of what I was taught. I believed that Heaven was a literal place where I would someday go. After death, I expected to stand before the Apostle Peter at the pearly gates—the most beautiful architectural edifice you could ever imagine, merely a precursor to the glorious mansions beyond—and Saint Peter would run his perfect, resurrected pointer finger down the W page in the Book of Life and find my name, alphabetically sorted alongside my parents’. The idea of eternity terrified—would we get bored, just singing hymns accompanied by cherubs on harps all day for the rest of existence? When I was younger, I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of heaven existing outside of time. Belief had its unsettling elements, but I clung to it anyway—unbelief was certainly worse, because it was unscripted. Unbelief could mean anything. And what could be more terrifying than that?
I reach over and kill the light on my phone. The darkness presses against my skin, probing the creases in my eyelids and the soft skin of my cuticles. I lie awake, alone in the queen-sized bed, wondering if I have what it takes to stare down the barrel of the abyss.
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